Exploring Life through the Written Word
Dear friends,
I met Jay Adler through Substack, where a mutual appreciation for sharp thinking and beautiful writing quickly led to a deeper friendship. Over time, we discovered that what bound us most closely was not just a love of literature but a shared belief in its power to illuminate the world and make meaning out of it. Jay’s writing is a testament to that belief—intelligent, searching, at times piercing, always human.
A native New Yorker, Jay came of age in the restless energy of postwar Queens, survived the revolutions of the Sixties, and grew into his voice in the gritty, electric city of the 1970s. Though his path took a detour through success in business, he found his way back to what mattered most: the written word. With advanced degrees in English literature from Columbia, he went on to teach in both Los Angeles and New York, and has spent his career writing across genres—poetry, fiction, memoir, screenplays, and criticism.
Jay’s work has appeared in The Hong Kong Review, California Quarterly, and ProgressivE-Zine, among others. His poetry collection Waiting for Word was published in 2021 by Finishing Line Press. Whether exploring the mythic landscape of Route 66 or the legacy of Hemingway, Jay writes with clarity, purpose, and a deep moral intelligence.
Our conversation reflects the kind of dialogue we’ve often had behind the scenes—honest, layered, and anchored in a shared conviction that language still matters.
Jay, thanks for your willingness to chat with me and my readers. Tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from originally, and where do you live now? What does your family and home life look like? How do you like to spend your time?
I’m from New York City originally – born in Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan – so I can claim Manhattan origination, but I grew up in various parts of New York’s borough of Queens, including Rockaway Beach. I lived most of the first half of my life in New York, but I now live in Los Angeles.
I’ve never been legally married, but Julia and I have been together for 29 years. She says I’m like a bur she can’t shake off (or maybe I say that), but I make her laugh and I can carry a conversation, so she relents and keeps me around. No children. I don’t think of myself as having “hobbies.” I have interests, some of which I know more or less about than others, or at which I have lesser or greater skill, that I pursue in the time available away from the great amount of time I spend writing. These interests include most of the arts, especially literature, film, theater, music, art, and, because of Julia, photography. My intellectual interests, thus reading, are many, from philosophy to history to political science to favored physical sciences such as physics and paleontology. I love to travel and to hike. I’ve also been a thrill seeker in my life, from skydiving to parasailing to riding gliders and ultralight planes, though considerations of age now advise me I should take fewer risks with, alas, invisibly, a more fragile body.
Growing up in Queens during the Eisenhower era and coming of age in the 1970s, how did these experiences shape your worldview and literary voice?
That’s a great question. I’m an almost entirely different person without those origins. I spent my first decade at the almost suburban, eastern edge of New York City, in what was, so characteristic of “the Eisenhower years” in the popular imagination, a halcyon time and place. But it was NYC nonetheless, which was even more in those days a city suffused with Jewish culture, along with Italian and Irish and more. Then, I went to college and lived on my own for the first time in Manhattan during a time, the 1970s, that was the city’s dangerous, funhouse-of-experience, dark dystopian era. All those influences, along with the 60s counterculture, stitched me into what I became by my late teens. Drench that creature next in all of the world, intellectual, and cultural history that was my high school and higher education and you get the full Frankenstein, whose literary voice is not unlike his literal voice – intellectual with a sometimes-loud, emotional New York neighborhood accent.
You had a successful business career before shifting directions to focus on literature. What prompted this significant life change, and how did it influence your writing?
That chronology is correct but it’s misleading. I was always going to be a writer and literary person, but I hadn’t yet successfully launched as a person when that brief international-startup business career came upon me by the accident of needing a job and then working my way up from the bottom by the thrill of it all. It completed my formation as a person in my late 20s, leaving me self-confident and worldly with experience. I left that career because I never intended it in the first place. But, of course, that increased breadth of experience was a writer’s nourishment. The lessons of that greater experience in life included the leaving of the business career itself, with my turning away from almost certain future wealth. It was the single most momentous, fully conscious choice I made in my life, and such choices also shape the person who becomes the artist.
How did your studies at Columbia University, particularly in British and American Modernism and James Joyce, influence your approach to writing?
When I left my business career, I returned to college to complete my B.A. and then go to graduate school. I had already in younger years steeped myself in early twentieth century literature – during my youth, that era and those writers were the literary firmament. Graduate study in the period completely cemented my own Modernist aesthetic and commitments as a writer. In A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Joyce famously writes that “The artist, like the god of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” In one sense, this is so ironically not the case with Joyce, whose autobiography and passionate love-hate for Ireland suffuse his work. And in my case, I’ve written a good deal of memoir. But also in my case, I haven’t achieved any fame in life, so why would people want to read about me? There isn’t any fascination with my celebrity, which I don’t have, or my participation in historic events to share. Some people in my position, then, write memoir as personal catharsis or to share lessons with others. Neither of these are motivations for me. The motivation is to make art of my life, to redeem my life in art. Yes, I suffered, but look what I made of it – this work of art, so much greater than I. And I worked hard, with concentration and dedication, the mission of my life, to do it. “Look, I made a hat,” sings painter George Seurat thrillingly in Stephen Sondheim’s great musical Sunday in the Park with George, “where there never was a hat!”
In a recent documentary film on the life and career of controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, he’s quoted as stating,” It’s not about the art. It’s about the life behind the art.” This is the very contrary of what motivates and guides me as a writer, and it crystallized for me the exact reason I’m not interested in Mapplethorpe as an artist.
You've written in poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and screenwriting. How do you navigate these different forms, and what draws you to each?
It really doesn’t require any work of navigation. Each of those impulses lives in me. At different times, particular events or periods of my life bring one to the fore, and I’m driven to write in it. This has been particularly so with the lyrical impulse and linguistic concentration of poetry. I’m not in a poetic period now. In the 2000s it was the political essay. Screenwriting is very specialized, with a particular goal within a narrow band of opportunity. At this point, without a remarkable offer coming my way from outside, it’s unlikely I’ll write screenplays again. I’m currently driven by my original narrative impulse.
Having won awards in screenwriting and written plays, how do you differentiate your creative process between these two mediums?
I actually wrote on that point in the introduction to my play What We Were Thinking Of, which I serialized on Homo Vitruvius this past summer and adapted from a one of my screenplays. I discussed the challenge of moving between the two artistic media. If you’ll forgive my quoting myself a little, I said that the error I made in first pursuing adaptation “was simply transferring the action and scenes from the two-dimensional yet expansive screen to the three-dimensional yet physically confined stage. I was not seeing the theatrical space. I was not reconceiving the drama for the theatrical space, to be expressed through the theatrical space. The fact that characters talk a lot does not make a play theater. . .. What is necessary instead is re-conception, a reimagining from its foundation of what the work of art is and how it functions.” So I would say that the creative process is in truth the same, and that begins, always, by understanding the unique and essential nature of any medium’s formal element.
In addition to other things, you describe yourself as an "artificer." How do you integrate various disciplines and art forms into your life? Do you see this inter-disciplinary approach as an integral aspect of your work?
My purposeful use of that word, “artificer,” is itself my very method of integration. It is all about the artifice, the design and creation out of real elements something artificial to provide a real yet aesthetic experience – and, yes, I do consider it integral to my work. I write in a multiplicity of genres, including nonfiction and creative nonfiction, across a range of interests and subjects, and I’ve come to think of this as part of what defines me as an artist. My interests and themes are the same but I pursue their expression differently in the different genres and media I use.
Your poetry collection, “Waiting for Word,” delves into themes of creation, memory, and loss. Can you discuss the central themes and what inspired them?
I so appreciate how well versed you are in my writing, Matthew. I’m honored. Anyone who reads Beyond the Bookshelf knows what a devoted reader you are – and you prepare for an interview with as much devotion! Thank you.
Memory and loss are fundamental to human experience, no? They’ve certainly run through my life. While some people work hard to leave the past behind and not focus on their losses, it’s been my artist’s nature since early childhood to dwell in them, to try to create something out of loss and the evanescence of the past that memory represents. No doubt, that tendency was intensified by my family history, particularly my father’s mysterious, tumultuous and torturous immigrant origins. Those influences became definitive of my work, too, as in the book-length memoir that I drafted in real time on Substack, Reason for Being in the World.
Your essays often tackle cultural and political issues. How do you balance personal narrative with broader societal commentary?
Another great question! (So many.) On the one hand, this balance or blend of personal narrative with historical and social commentary – analysis, perspective – is, I think, another of my defining characteristics as a writer. That’s who I am as a person, so there is no effort involved in the balancing. On the other hand, though there are certainly readers who appreciate the blend, my experience is that others don’t. They’re looking for one or the other, or something else entirely, and they become confused about who I am as a writer and what I offer, and I lose some readers who find too much of what’s different from what drew them to start. As almost anyone who publishes on Substack itself knows, this has been a real issue in this publishing realm as it is elsewhere. “What’s your niche?” I don’t have a niche. My niche is no niche.
Your Substack newsletter is titled "Homo Vitruvius." What does this concept mean to you, and how does it reflect your writing philosophy?
I drew the title from Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic 1487 Renaissance and pre-Enlightenment drawing known informally as Vitruvian Man, inspired by ideas of the Roman architect Vitruvius Pollio. That image is the logo of Homo Vitruvius, which I fancifully conceive as an advanced evolutionary stage of homo sapiens and further label “a renascent light against the darkness.” What’s the darkness? It's descending now, from all sides, on the light of reason, humanism, the spirit of free inquiry, and artistic insight. Forces from the reactionary right around the world want to return us to a pre-modern state of nonrational, blood and land religious enchantment and piety. Totalitarian ideologies on the far left attack the ideas and values of the Englightment as merely ruling ideologies that defend and advance institutions of oppressive power. My entire intellectual and creative life has been lived in opposition to those distorted polarities.
What are your goals for the "Homo Vitruvius" newsletter, and how do you engage with your readership there?
Well, first, I don’t call it a newsletter, as it’s commonly fashioned. What I write is “news” only in the sense Ezra Pound meant it when he said that “poetry is news that stays news.” There are Substacks that function as newsletters. Others function as blogs that happen to be hosted on Substack. Some are like magazines. What I’m doing is publishing some of my imaginative and intellectual creative work on Homo Vitruvius. It’s my personal publication platform for work I’m not currently seeking to publish more traditionally elsewhere for whatever reason. You could say It’s my salon or studio, where I invite people to come in for an afternoon or evening, walk around, see what I’ve been up to creatively, consider if they might want to buy something and stay abreast of my career. I imagine maintaining Homo Vitruvius in just this way for some unforeseeable long time to come.
How do I engage with my audience? Does my work provoke reactions and thoughts in you about art and the world? Come. Sit. Would you like a demitasse? Let’s talk.
With a background in philosophy, how do philosophical concepts influence your literary work?
They’re inseparable, as they’re inseparable from who I am as a person. But I don’t write creatively out of any program to advance philosophical ideas. Though I hold strong intellectual and political commitments, I’m not a political artist or ideological in that way. My creative works arises from my whole human experience, deeply shaped by the emotions of my being alive, refined into what I can make of it all through imaginative vision and intellect.
As a professor of English, how has teaching influenced your writing, and vice versa?
I don’t seek to be instructional in my writing, though close and careful analysis contains a didactic element. But when I started on Substack, I was making use at times of material and ideas, methods, from my teaching life. I gradually stopped doing that. My 30+ year teaching career is pretty much over, and I’ve enjoyed many phases to my life. I like change. I embrace it. (Resistance is futile anyway.) So I’ve moved on from being a pedagogue. That long phase is over. I’m a writer, what I’ve always been, but now wholly.
What advice do you offer to emerging writers navigating multiple genres?
Hmm. Wow, Matthew! Damn!
Most aren’t, I don’t think. But do it, I’d say – write in multiple genres – be that person – only if you can’t not be, because the world wants to categorize you. It wants you a member of a club. The clubs want you a member of their club and don’t support you belonging to more than one or not belonging at all. If you cannot, nonetheless, be anything but yourself, you’ll know.
Your journey along Route 66 with photographer Julia Dean resulted in "The American Road." How did this experience influence your perspective on American identity?
I’m serious, you are a helluva good interviewer. You should do even more of it.
As the child and grandchild of immigrants who fled persecution and poverty, I had a love affair with America. No one who was related to me set foot on this continent before the twentieth century, yet I absorbed its history and its landscape as if it actually had something to do with me personally. That was the promise of America. (Julia and I were traveling in Europe during 9/11. When we finally flew home nearly a month later, we talked with the African-born airport security guard near our gate at Charles de Gaule Airport. He was already living a far better life than the one he came from, but still he said to us, “America – it is the dream.”) I myself had dreamed about traveling Route 66 – the American road – since I was a boy in New York City dreaming of the wide expanse of that American landscape and culture. That trip from Chicago to Los Angeles, for the route’s 80th anniversary – my first travel through most of those states – through the Southwest – was, then, for me, my dream come true. Julia documented the journey visually with her 4 X 5 pinhole photography. I tried to capture in my historical essay the varieties of fulfillment, the opening up of new vistas for me and for millions who came before us, on Route 66 and all the other roads to new lives over the history of American westward travel. We were fortunate enough to publish the essay in, alas, the final issue of DoubleTake, a much-admired magazine of documentary journalism and photography. Harvard’s Robert Coles, who co-founded the magazine, expressed his particular admiration for the piece, which was its own, separate reward for us.
Being the grandson of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, how does your heritage inform your writing?
As I say, those origins and the mystery of my father’s early life shaped my creative and historical concerns and themes, though I’m not limited to them.
You've lived in various states across the U.S. How have these geographical shifts impacted your creative output?
They broadened me immeasurably – the reward of travel, of openness to change, of life lived variously. I started out in life pretty much determined by circumstance and environment to be a “New York writer.” I didn’t ultimately become that. That’s because, despite my passion for the city, my life took me to other places. Among my longer works in progress is a noir crime novel set in California’s Central Valley. But also, while there are many writers who have famously created amidst poverty and their psychological and emotional torments and the instability of their lives – which for me are connected to my moving around – those experiences mostly debilitated me and diminished my productivity. I’m racing to catch up.
I believe you are still working on "The Dream of Don Juan de Cartagena," a novel about the Magellan expedition. What drew you to this historical subject?
I am still working on it. It was accidental. I was doing research for a poem and stumbled on accounts of the expedition that stunned me with their dense mystery and epic, tragic drama. I couldn’t stop reading and researching. The story embraces so many of my preoccupying themes, including the one that spurred that research to begin: the effect on a life of long journeying away from home and one’s origins — which, literally or more figuratively, is what every human life, from beginning to end, in truth is.
How do you perceive the current literary landscape? In today's society, what do you believe is the role of the writer, particularly in times of cultural or political upheaval?
The current literary landscape is producing a lot of dissatisfaction among writers. There’s a lot of discussion on Substack about it, largely among writers decades younger than I. That’s understandable. They rightly see their careers as deeply invested in any transformations or lack of them to come in the publishing environment. They feel excluded for any number of reasons and they represent a cadre with some commonality of interest. Some of these discontents are cultural and political in origin, some economic. Many of these discontents touch me, too, but because I’m so much older, the meaning for me of the current situation and any changes is different.
One element of the problem is the union that took place over decades of literary culture, academia, and politics. The relationship isn’t new, but it’s now nearly complete, and its effect has been quite deleterious. Many writer-academics today don’t see their academic commitments as separate from their political commitments, which they view as their mission to pursue in their art and around which they’ve developed an ingrained ideological, academized vocabulary that they employ – remarkably, for writers – without critical and aesthetic judgment. This vocabulary shows up in book blurbs; it shows up in poetry. Too much poetry is patently polemical and obvious, too much narrative ideologically shaped and driven. It’s true that over the past couple of centuries, writers and other artists often formed movements that expressed shared aesthetic commitments with ideological implications. But the aesthetic came first in interest, and, more importantly, these were avant gardes of one kind or another, challenging entrenched cultural establishments, not the establishment itself, which this nexus intellectually and to some extent institutionally now is. That’s a critical distinction.
You’ll understand from this that I don’t favor “political art,” but what my quotation marks indicate is a particular meaning of that phrase, as ideologically determined and driven art. Of course, art, and writing more specifically, has political implications – “politics” broadly defined. All cultural creations do. But to the degree that the politics are prioritized over the art (with exception as always, in all things), the art suffers. So, in that regard, I do not believe that writers, as writers, have particular roles to play in times of cultural and political upheaval. They have roles to play as people, as we all do in the life of our times, if we accept that responsibility. As people, writers have particular skills they might employ to play that role as a person. If they can find ways to create art that works as art, not as a political tool, and that responds to the currents of their time, then we’re on to something.
Which writers or thinkers have most significantly influenced your work?
Among writers, significantly and unsurprisingly, when I was young, a wide swath of Modernists: Hemingway, Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Joyce – Henry James and Fitzgerald, too. Among poets, Wallace Stevens more than William Carlos Williams – and Gerard Manley Hopkins. As cultural and intellectual foundation, the ancient Greeks – the tragedians, who had our number early on. In the modern world, the existentialists, particularly Albert Camus. Still later, Martin Heidegger (I know I know), which led me to Buddhism.
What inspired you to create American Samizdat, and how does it relate to your broader body of work?
I created American Samizdat last summer in direct response to Trumpism. I first wrote in opposition to Trump and what he represents early in 2016, and I published several more pieces over the next few years. I republished them again on Homo Vitruvius in late 2023. I really did not want to write about “politics” ever again after the 2000s. It had distracted me from my creative work and I wanted to be done with that distraction. I don’t consider myself now to be writing about politics in the granular, gritty, aggrieved way most of us encounter it daily. My cause is liberal democracy and the rule of law. That’s it. From George Soros to Liz Cheney, if you support those ideas, we’re in it together. A major preoccupation of my writing is that of ordinary lives lived within the stream of capital-H history. Right now in the United States that history is unfolding. It would betray every ideal I’ve ever held and advocated about responsibility and engagement in the life of one’s times not to play my part in opposing what’s happening in the U.S. now. Another Substack friend I’ve made, like you – connections across age, space, and experience that are among the rewards of Substack – is the world-traveling Englishman, now living in Japan,
of The English Republic of Letters. He has the insight and skill to perfectly capture back then what I was feeling, which I quoted in my essay “Poetry, Humanism, and ‘Political Man’: “This summer, you've struck me as being a bit like a 17th-century English poet, retired to his garden to write and reflect, who one day hears outside the walls the clamour of civil strife and so re-enters the public fray.” That was it exactly.The term "samizdat" refers to clandestine literature circulated in the Soviet Union. Why did you choose this term for your project, and what parallels do you see between that historical context and today's America?
Obviously, American Samizdat is not (yet) actually “samizdat,” but I chose the name as a warning and in anticipation of it coming true. I must say (never having had great claim to prophecy) that everything I foresaw and publicly predicted about Trumpism from the start is coming to pass, and I fear that will, too. Authoritarian tyranny has no nationality. As the United States is in the process of definitively establishing, it can happen anywhere.
You've described American Samizdat as offering "art, culture, information, and ideas for a free, tolerant, and democratic people." How do you envision this mission manifesting through your writings?
American Samizdat aims to address the moment and the issues primarily not through a political but rather an artist’s lens, though an artist well versed in political philosophy and world and intellectual history. When I publish essays, they are not polemical screeds but rather humanistic analyses of our social condition. I’ve also published poetry and fiction addressing themes relevant to our current situation. I want the writing on American Samizdat to manifest the alternative to aggrieved, reactionary brutalitarianism, to anti-modern anti-intellectualism. I hope it will represent the spirit of humanism, a humanism that recognizes its roots in our earliest spiritual uprisings in belief but that isn’t prevented by uncritical adherence to past beliefs from the advancement of spirit into the future.
In your essay "The Lost Humanism of Political Discourse," you discuss the degradation of political conversation. How does American Samizdat aim to address and perhaps rectify this issue?
I have no illusion that my small voice can rectify anything. “All I have is a voice,” wrote” W. H. Auden, “To undo the folded lie.” All I can do is play the part each of us may feel called to, which in American Samizdat is what I explain above, but beyond it, too, in all my writing, such as in Reason for Being in the World, in which I try to extract some purpose to my own life within the course of my family and human history.
How do you balance artistic expression with political commentary in your essays, such as in "The Brutalists" and "The American Brutalitarian Interregnum"?
Trying to think, understand, and write beyond the din of narrow, everyday political contention in American Samizdat (and Homo Vitruvius, too), I seek to contextualize the current time in broader historical movements. Brutalitarianism is a term I’ve coined to characterize human impulses to power, conquest, domination, and acquisitiveness that run through history since long before modern political ideologies and movements. They predate the Enlightenment and religious notions of the good, neither of which managed to conquer those impulses in us and both of which, in truth, have often been co-opted in the service of those impulses. The contention running through human history between brutalitarianism and our greater impulses toward ethically motivated, humane life and social organization continues unabated.
Brady Corbett’s recent film The Brutalist drew its title from an architectural style that denotes an aesthetic. The term had multiple applications in the film, including the Nazi Holocaust of which the protagonist is a survivor, and the film’s own aesthetic. I seized the opportunity in writing about the film as a work of art that has nothing to do with the current American time to extend discussion of the film to the American present. I sought to synthesize the insights and experience of art with intellectual analysis of the human and society. Art and philosophy as a unified response to our being in this world: that is an ideal of the Enlightenment and the ideal purpose of Homo Vitruvius. American Samizdat offers a more specific focus of that purpose on the American situation now.
What are your goals for the future of American Samizdat, and how do you plan to achieve them?
You earlier quoted the mission of the stack: "art, culture, information, and ideas for a free, tolerant, and democratic people." The stack’s slogan is “To warn against, prepare for, and persevere until” – until it no longer serves a purpose, because the immediate threat has been overcome, when I will gladly stop producing it. Then I will also gladly, late in life, as Jeffrey conjured, retire to my garden to write and reflect and create – the artificer always – until I’m done.
Where can people connect with you online?
In addition to Substack, @ajayadler, I am on Bluesky at @ajayadler.bsky.social and LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/ajayadler.
You can pick up copies of Jay’s books at his website, https://ajayadler.com/.
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Until next time,
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